“I certainly do,” Euthyphron answered.

“No, wait. I see what Sokrates means,” another soldier broke in. “You can’t have that both ways. It’s one or the other. Which do you say it is?”

Euthyphron tried to have it both ways. Sokrates’ questions wouldn’t let him. Some of the other Athenians jeered at him. Others showed more sympathy for him, even in his confusion, than they did for Sokrates. “Do you have to be a gadfly all the time?” a hoplite asked him after Euthyphron, very red in the face, bolted out of the line without getting his supper.

“I can only be what I am,” Sokrates answered. “Am I wrong for trying to find the truth in everything I do?”

The other man shrugged. “I don’t know whether you’re right or wrong. What I do know is, you’re cursed annoying.”

When Sokrates blinked his big round eyes in surprise, he looked uncommonly like a frog. “Why should the search for truth be annoying? Would you not think preventing that search to be a greater annoyance for mankind?”

But the hoplite threw up his hands. “Oh, no, you don’t. I won’t play. You’re not going to twist me up in knots, the way you did with poor Euthyphron.”

“Euthyphron’s thinking was not straight before I ever said a word to him. All I did was show him his inconsistencies. Now maybe he will try to root them out.”

The other soldier tossed his head. But he still refused to argue. Sighing, Sokrates snaked forward with the rest of the line. A bored-looking cook handed him a small loaf of dark bread, a chunk of cheese, and an onion. The man filled his cup with watered wine and poured olive oil for the bread into a little cruet he held out.

“I thank you,” Sokrates said. The cook looked surprised. Soldiers and sailors were likelier to grumble about the fare than thank him for it.

Men clustered in little knots of friends to eat and to go on hashing over the coming of the Salaminia and what it was liable to mean. Sokrates had no usual group to join. Part of the reason there was that he was at least twenty years older than most of the other Athenians who’d traveled west to Sicily. But his age was only part of the reason, and he knew it. He sighed. He didn’t want to make people uncomfortable. He didn’t want to, but he’d never been able to avoid it.